Open Source

In the last few years open source has transformed the software industry. From Android to Wikipedia, open source is everywhere, but how does one succeed in it? While open source projects come in all shapes and sizes and all forms of governance, no matter what kind of project you’re a part of, there are a set of fundamentals that lead to success. I’d like to share some of the lessons I’ve learned from running two of the largest commercial open source projects, Docker & MongoDB , as well as some very successful community based projects (Hugo, spf13-vim, Cobra, Viper, Zoop).
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A friend of mine who is a very talented writer recently became intrigued with open source and asked me to help her to understand how to be a good open source community member. Open source is one of the most unusual things in the world. Is there any other profession where highly skilled professionals donate their free time to give their work away for free? Many spend long hours at their day jobs, just to spend their nights and weekends doing the same thing.
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Nearly 3 years ago I discovered a new database that literally changed my life. I know, that’s a pretty bold claim, but it’s true. While leading the engineering team at OpenSky I faced a problem I was well familiar with. How to build a e-commerce product that: 1. Provided performance and scale 2. Handled many verticals and 3. Provided proper indexing on key attributes. In search for a better solution to this problem I encountered MongoDB.
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Open Source licensing can be a confusing and daunting task. Most developers simply adopt licenses of other popular projects. I wanted to shed some light on the most popular licenses and provide some guidance on which one should be used and when. Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer, I am not qualified to nor am I imparting sound legal advice. BSD & MIT Both licenses are very similar. They are very liberal and allow for sub-licensing meaning that any derived works may be released under a different (commercial or otherwise) license.
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I have spent the last few years tweaking and refining my VIM configuration until I had the Ultimate Vim Config. It is well organized and documented taking full advantage of Tpope’s pathogen for a excellent clean and modular configuration. The Ultimate vim config contains the perfect .vimrc file combined with an excellent set of plugins all easily managed thanks to pathogen and git. It is on GitHub so you can always grab the latest.
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